A Great Nephew and a Great Aunt, Guests-Robyn Hood Black and her Niece, Sara

Ants may rule the hill, but they don’t rule here! Art by Landon (Click to Enlarge)

Happy National Poetry Month!

Hello, Great Readers of our series! Just In case you haven’t visited before, let me tell you a little about A Great Nephew and A Great Aunt. My great nephew, Landon (a sixth-grader) and I (his great aunt) collaborate. I write a poem which he illustrates. We started this collaboration in the fall of 2014 and have had so much fun with it that we decided to invite others along. Landon and I will continue to have a new episode on the second Friday of each month. The other Fridays are filling up quickly with guests.

I have created a page on my website to view all the episodes of A Great Nephew and a Great Aunt. Click HERE to visit the page and enjoy past episodes.

Today it’s my pleasure to share a creative collaboration from . . .

Robyn Hood Black and her Niece, Sara

From Robyn: I’m delighted to drop in for this series, Penny – Thanks so much for including me and a couple of family members!

I’m lucky to have two little great-nephews (if I’ve got the family-relations terminology right), one on each side of the family. For this post I thought it would be fun to include one of them, and a piece of artwork that my niece (husband’s sister’s daughter) created of him recently. Her name is Sara, and the adorable subject, Carter, is HER nephew, first child of her older sister, Abbie.

The Art

About this work: “The drawing is ink and watercolor on paper,” Sara says. “I usually tend to gravitate toward abstraction but I was reminded of the cathartic experience of painting from life. My nephew Carter is just full of life and personality, constantly surprising us with his wit, curiosity and intellect. He’s growing and changing so quickly and I wanted to try to capture how he is in this moment, to immortalize this moment before it slips away.”

For a wee bit more fun, I thought we might enjoy some artwork by Carter, who has just turned two this month.

Art by Carter

I asked Carter’s dad, Blake, if he could wrangle an artist’s statement out of his talented son. This is what he tells me the young artist had to say:

Hello, my name is Carter… But like everyone else, you can call me – “CARTER!!!” This piece is influenced by early Walt Disney character renderings… pre fame and notoriety. (Specifically when Walt was 2 years old, like me.)

Carter

Sara and Robyn

Many thanks to Robyn, Sara, and Carter for sharing their talents with us today!

Meet Sara: Sara Stansell Clark graduated in 2012 with a BFA in drawing and painting with a secondary emphasis in fabric design and art history from The University of Georgia. You can find more art at her website: sarastansellart.weebly.com

She’s currently Assistant Business Manager at North Hills Club in Raleigh, NC, wife of Will, and puppy mother to Bear.

Meet Robyn: Robyn Hood Black is a poet, children’s author, and artist hanging with the Spanish moss in coastal South Carolina. Her poetry appears in The Poetry Friday Anthology series by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong (Pomelo Books), Georgia Heard’s The Arrow Finds Its Mark (Roaring Brook), and Lee Bennett Hopkins’s Lullaby and Kisses Sweet (Abrams) as well as in Ladybug,Hopscotch, and in leading haiku journals including Frogpond and Modern Haiku. Highlights has published her fiction. Her first two books were Sir Mike (Scholastic Library) and Wolves (Intervisual Books). She also creates “literary art with a vintage vibe” through her art business & Etsy shop, artsyletters. You can find Robyn here:
Website: robynhoodblack.comEtsy Shop: http://artsyletters.com/

April, I’m thrilled that you found the party! Welcome! This series has been so much fun for me. Having guests like Robyn, Sara, and Carter is such a pleasure. It sounds as if you checked out some other pairings…great! I hope you’ll join us again. There is a new collaboration every week on Friday.

This is all quite loving and beautiful, that sweet look on Carter’s face in Sara’s drawing and Robyn’s love that keeps growing. A great collection of family love, Penny. My grandson’s name is also Carter, so I love seeing another Carter in the world.

So much love in this post! Carter is lucky to have such creative and doting aunts. And clearly Carter’s fondness for creativity runs in the family! Sara’s art and Robyn’s poem are both gorgeous, capturing the essence of a little one who will not be satisfied with being a 2 year old for very long. Thanks as always, Penny, for this personal and enlightening series.

I love all the connections in this, nieces and nephews and aunts, and the warmth and humour. Beautiful art, and nice connection between words and art – and also the way your poem comes full circle back to growing – but focusing on the love. (I can see the similarity between Carter’s work and Sara’s… in that they both used red! 😉 )